Oracle Blog

Insights into information rights management

Man finds US troop data on MP3 player

I am woefully behind on updating the blog this year. Things have been very busy and I have a stack of articles waiting to be edited and published. However this just broke in the news and I thought it was too important to delay. The BBC, ABC and others are just reporting a story about New Zealand man, Chris Ogle, who has stumbled upon 60 US military files that were stored on a second hand MP3 player he bought at a secondhand store in Oklahoma. The data contained a wide variety of confidential and personal information including US social security numbers and even which female troops were pregnant!

Shocking news and this is just one of an increasing number of incidents where government agencies are repeatably failing to maintain control over their sensitive information in digital form. Last year one of the most highly publicized incidents was the loss of the details of 7 million families by the UK government. The discs were sent in the regular mail and never arrived at their destination.

I'm sure these agencies are now rushing around, initiating huge internal audits to track down the single points of failure in process and security that leads to these losses. This is where the real value of Oracle IRM comes into play. Deploying the technology across the organization and using one single, organization wide, classification to which there is a catch all for sensitive information, provides a simple and easy mechanism to protect against such losses. In the meantime better process and clearer classification policies can be implement and enforced with IRM as the organizations learn about how this data is actually used.